Congratulations on Traveller!

[pasuuli]

But back to my original point: How does world creation work when the UWP, as people have stated, is implicitly Traveller,

It's not, though - they're very generic. What makes them specifically traveller really is the social stuff - the population, government, law, and tech level,a and those can just be tweaked for different settings.

and the companion IPs already have their own well defined take on things? SST will want other kinds of info, such as climate or topography; Strontium Dog or Dredd and the UWP is not a good mix, methinks.

Well Dredd isn't interplanetary/interstellar anyway is it? Climate can be added easily to the UWP, and topography isn't really an issue - if you want mountains or craters then you'd find them on pretty much any world.

Quite right - the UWPs are Space-Operatic, and nothing more. And SST's not alone in wanting more than just some bare data; Traveller games require the GM to write up what the worlds are actually like. As EDG and others mention, the UWP is the starting point.

 

[EDG]

Quite right - the UWPs are Space-Operatic, and nothing more. And SST's not alone in wanting more than just some bare data; Traveller games require the GM to write up what the worlds are actually like. As EDG and others mention, the UWP is the starting point.

I do think there's a lot to be said for providing some guidelines for interpreting the UWPs though. If there's a step between "here's the UWP" and "here's a full description" that explains how to get from one to the other then that could be very helpful. Like, what does it mean if a star is a given type, or how low gravity or thin atmosphere affects what the environment of small worlds would be like, or what life would be like if there were 50 billion people on a planet, etc.

 

[Klaus Kipling]

It's not a case of not being bothered to write up stuff. I like writing up stuff. The UWP prevents me writing what I want. I'm restricted to a few half-hearted facts. If I pay good money for a product, I expect more than UWP.

When I first picked up Traveller in 2000, I thought the UWP was a brilliant idea. Through trying to make sense of it all (not helped by most of the numbers being nonsense), and finding that the whole OTU has been thinly whitewashed with them has put me off it.

The UWP as part of a description is good. It can never wholly describe a world.

I realise that people here have invested years into the UWP, but it's a shibboleth. It needs improving or replacing. It doesn't do the job it's meant to do.

If it's a hook for a ref to work with, it's a damn complicated way of generating one. Using your own imagination is far quicker (and more interesting).

If it's a way of keeping the OTU consistent, then it doesn't work. The results are too generic. There are so many different solutions to a UWP then there can be no consistency. And it does not contain the unique features that make different planets interesting. It's bland.

It doesn't hold enough data. (Cross posting again) T20 recognised this. There's extra qualifiers like World Climate, Natural Resources, Indigenous Lifeforms, and Trade Balance. It's just that these were never implemented in sourcebooks.

Looking up tables. Yes, I know looking up a table isn't rocket science, but it usually means flipping pages, which takes time. I've virtually memorised the tables, but there's still the odd one I need to check. As information design it's lousy. It's too easy to read the wrong number. RPG's are complicated enough, without bad info design making it worse. Jakob Nielsen would be appalled..

I know I've set myself up against the majority here, but I think this needs to be said. The UWP is far from perfect. As such, it is legitimate to examine it from a different point of view.

As I've stated, I wouldn't be sorry to see it wither. That doesn't mean I'd fight to kill it. Hopefully by discussing this we can come up with ways to improve it.

Surely no ones saying it can't be improved?!?

 

[EDG]

If I pay good money for a product, I expect more than UWP.

And I can't think of a single product since T4's atrocious "First Survey" that ever gave you just the UWPs. So I think you're using a strawman there, because I don't think anyone's arguing that there should be books containing just the UWPs on their own.

When I first picked up Traveller in 2000, I thought the UWP was a brilliant idea. Through trying to make sense of it all (not helped by most of the numbers being nonsense), and finding that the whole OTU has been thinly whitewashed with them has put me off it.

Well it sounds very much like you're blaming the wrong thing for Traveller's inadequacies. Look at stuff like the TNE Regency Sourcebook and T20's Gateway to Destiny, they have UWPs and lots of descriptions too. Although GT lacks the UWPs, its Rim of Fire sector book and Sword Worlds subsector book are awesome too.

The UWP as part of a description is good. It can never wholly describe a world.

Maybe not completely, but it can go a hell of a long way toward doing it. Really, one could say that the stuff in the UWP wouldn't make for an interesting text description (other than being a long list of stuff), and the description can flesh the whole thing out... but that doesn't mean the UWP can't provide a lot of useful information.

I realise that people here have invested years into the UWP, but it's a shibboleth. It needs improving or replacing. It doesn't do the job it's meant to do.

Um, no. It does exactly the job it was designed to do though, which was to provide a lot of useful info about a world in a very concise way, so that one could summarise an entire subsector on a single page.

What you really mean is that it doesn't do the job that YOU want it to do. It certainly does need improving, but it's not useless, not by a long shot.

If it's a hook for a ref to work with, it's a damn complicated way of generating one. Using your own imagination is far quicker (and more interesting).

It's a very simple way of generating one actually. The problem with "using your imagination" is that it's not consistent. You need to have a consistent framework to create these things, or worlds are going to make even less sense than they do already.

If it's a way of keeping the OTU consistent, then it doesn't work. The results are too generic. There are so many different solutions to a UWP then there can be no consistency. And it does not contain the unique features that make different planets interesting. It's bland.

Again, it could do with a few more terms added to it, but the consistency is still there. You may not be able to tell one B878779A world from another, but you still know that they're both earth-size worlds with tainted atmospheres at standard pressure, 80% hydrographics, tens of millions of people living under a lot of rival governments at high law level and roughly 22nd century tech.

It doesn't hold enough data. (Cross posting again) T20 recognised this. There's extra qualifiers like World Climate, Natural Resources, Indigenous Lifeforms, and Trade Balance. It's just that these were never implemented in sourcebooks.

Sure, and I'm all for adding that sort of thing (so long as its sensibly done). That sort of thing can separate out those aforementioned B878779A worlds, but then you may end up getting into the problem of adding *too much* data and turning the UWP into a ridiculously long High Guard ship profile type thing.

Looking up tables. Yes, I know looking up a table isn't rocket science, but it usually means flipping pages, which takes time.

And you wouldn't be looking up rules for feats or spell descriptions in D&D (I do it all the damn time and we've been playing the same D&D game for three years)? Crucifying traveller for the same things that you'd do without complaint in other games seems somewhat unfair don't you think?

I've virtually memorised the tables, but there's still the odd one I need to check. As information design it's lousy. It's too easy to read the wrong number.

Then learn the tables better and take more care reading it. Seriously. It's just like every other rule in an RPG - with enough practise it comes more naturally.

RPG's are complicated enough, without bad info design making it worse.

UWPs are awesome info design actually - look at what I said earlier when I broke down the UWP into its component parts, and tell me a better way to cram all that information into just one line of text. Just because you can't appreciate that doesn't mean it needs to be replaced.

I know I've set myself up against the majority here, but I think this needs to be said. The UWP is far from perfect. As such, it is legitimate to examine it from a different point of view.

Oh absolutely. But I'd rather see an effort made to improve the format first than just dismiss it completely on specious grounds such as "it's too complicated" or "it's incomprehensible". The UWP is quite salvageable, and I'm certainly not prepared to toss it out completely.

Surely no ones saying it can't be improved?!?

Nobody is saying that - heck, I've been saying it can be improved all the time here - but I'll fight tooth, nail and claw to keep some kind of UWP in the game. There is absolutely no good reason to drop it completely from Traveller.

 

[Klaus Kipling]

Yeah, maybe you're right about the first point, it is a straw man. All the stuff since T4 has had a good treatment (though writing 440 worlds in one go might have been a bit too much, and it unfortunately getting released without the final draft.)

I'd just like to see more of the Marches done the Avenger way.

I'm always looking up things like weapons and game mechanics, spell descriptions, etc, I just don't expect to have to, to understand a world description. When I look up a spell, I don't want to then have to look up a load of codes for what it actually does. The UWP is like a spell expressed as a number string.

I can appreciate it's concision and neatness, but it does not comply with good information design theory, and that is FACT, especially in a subsector block. It is like looking at a phone bill. For a set of variables in computer code, it's perfect. The software interprets it for you. Not so good for humans. An (very strained, to be sure) analogy is the difference between playing a Spectrum game and reading it expressed in BASIC on sheets of paper.

Just compared the UWP with the way Star Frontiers notates planets (via those nifty new remastered pdfs you can download legally).

System/Planet Col. Pop. Grav. Moons Day Star
Araks                                   Yellow
Hentz          Y    HI   .7     0   25

(H means High population, I means Idustrial, all defined at the foot of the table)

... and a short capsule...

Hentz (Araks) is ruled by a religious clan, the Family of One. Everyone who lives there wears a uniform showing his job and position.

Now thats not even trying as hard as the UWP is to describe stuff, but it still tells me more info, that may be even more useful stuff (dominant race, gravity, number of moons, length of day) for when my players visit (than how big the seas are). And at a glance - I have no further definitions to look up.

The capsule gives me (here) the equivalent of GOV. But is that 5 or D? Well, it's kinda like both - it tells me more.

And it's consistent across every GMs Frontier, as much as it needs to be.

There's no info on atmosphere, it is assumed most planets are breathable, and if not, it appears in the capsule. Same with tech and law level. The only thing missing is a starport (easily rectified).

The Frontier is about the same as a subsector in size. It fits on one page. So would a Traveller subsector if you included several short capsules.

Not suggesting this as an alternative, of course, just a useful comparison..
So is the UWP (+short capsule) so superior to the above?

Remember, the UWP is not the system used to create it, it is an expression of that system. It could easily be expressed differently.

And that brings me to using the UWP for SST and 2000AD IPs. The UWP is idiomatic of Traveller, it's essentially the way the 3I decribes it's worlds (and I do realise that is actually an argument for keeping it ). Dredd (and Dredd is by no means limited to Earth) and Strontium Dog have a very different idiom. The UWP doesn't taste like Wagner and Ezquerra.

 

[EDG]

I'm always looking up things like weapons and game mechanics, spell descriptions, etc, I just don't expect to have to, to understand a world description. When I look up a spell, I don't want to then have to look up a load of codes for what it actually does. The UWP is like a spell expressed as a number string.

I can understand a UWP perfectly well without looking up any codes. Fact is, you need to learn how to use the rules and what they mean when you play a game. If you're arguing that you can't understand something without putting the required effort into it, then you may as well not bother trying to learn any rules at all. Those of us who are prepared to put that effort in (and it's really not a lot of effort at all) generally find the results to be very rewarding.

I think it was you that mentioned laziness earlier, when you labelled the use of UWPs as lazy. I think it's the other way round though - complaining that people shouldn't have to learn a few numbers is what strikes me as being "lazy". I learned what all those tables meant in a few days when I was in my teens, are you really telling me that people are intimidated by them now? If they are, then I'd say that they're really not the target audience for the game.

I can appreciate it's concision and neatness, but it does not comply with good information design theory, and that is FACT, especially in a subsector block.

I don't know about it being a "fact". What IS a fact is that it is possible to get vastly more info out of a Traveller UWP than that Star Frontiers thing you put up.

Just compared the UWP with the way Star Frontiers notates planets (via those nifty new remastered pdfs you can download legally).

System/Planet Col. Pop. Grav. Moons Day Star
Araks                                   Yellow
Hentz          Y    HI   .7     0   25

(H means High population, I means Idustrial, all defined at the foot of the table)

... and a short capsule...

Hentz (Araks) is ruled by a religious clan, the Family of One. Everyone who lives there wears a uniform showing his job and position.

Now thats not even trying as hard as the UWP is to describe stuff, but it still tells me more info, that may be even more useful stuff (dominant race, gravity, number of moons, length of day) for when my players visit (than how big the seas are). And at a glance - I have no further definitions to look up.

That's hilarious. Are you seriously telling me that the SF way is better than a UWP? You can't tell anything useful from that!

How big is the planet? What atmosphere does it have? Does it have any water? How many people live on it? How long is its year? What life does it have on it? What are its natural resources? What else is in the system? What's the technology level? What government does it have? How do they rule?

And it's consistent across every GMs Frontier, as much as it needs to be.

It's full of gaping holes, is what it is. There's no consistency at all there.
The description is laughable too - you might as well say "Zaonce is plagued by ravenous packs of rampaging carnivorous art graduates".

So is the UWP (+short capsule) so superior to the above?

Yes, it absolutely is. The UWP is vastly and demonstrably superior to the SF version.

Take this for example - from a single, one-line UWP and a little bit of research and imagination, I came up with this right now, off the top of my head, in about 20 minutes (and its mostly took that long because I was writing it out - I got the concept in about five minutes of thought). The stuff in [square brackets] are the parts of the UWP that I used to base the description on:

Archaea 1517 E8A9202-8    Lo Ni              710      F2 V    H 5 N

Physical data: Archaea is a young world - barely 1.5 billion years old [F V stars have short lives, so the planet is young] - orbiting in the habitable zone [orbital zone H] of an active yellow/white F2 V star. Its orbital period is 3.82 earth years [orbit 5 is 2.8 AU, around an F2 V star that is 1.5 solar masses], and its rotation period is 14 hours [N - not tidelocked]. It strongly resembles the Earth in the late archaean era (hence the name), with 90% of the planet covered in green-tinted water oceans that are teeming with microbial life [hydro 9, coupled with young age]. Archaea's mean surface temperature is somewhat warmer than Earth's, as it is covered by a thick atmosphere of nitrogen and carbon dioxide that is effective at retaining heat [type A exotic atmosphere] - however the increased greenhouse effect is offset somewhat by the planet being closer to the outer edge of its primary's habitable zone [Orbit 5, ideal habitable zone distance is closer than the distance this corresponds to]. Several extensive, volcanically-active island arcs punctuate the oceans, spewing more gas into the atmosphere [hyd 9 and age again].

Archaea is generally a storm-wracked world - the ocean is warm and extensive (and the long year means that the warm seasons are longer), its star is energetic, its rotation period is faster than Earth's and there is little continuous land surface to easily dissipate the hurricanes that form [hyd 9 again]. Unusually, no gas giants are present in the planetary system, though there is a belt of icy debris marking its outer edge [belts 1, gas giants 0].

Social Data: The colony on Archaea was originally established by BioSys Corp as a research base investigating potential applications of the primitive bacteria native to the planet. For a while the base grew, but forty years ago BioSys suffered a series of catastrophic financial scandals that resulted in its dismemberment, and its assets were redistributed. The Archaea base was deemed to be largely worthless as research trends had moved on by that time, but the inhabitants were given a choice to either move off-world to work for other companies, or to buy out the base (which was now worth considerably less than it was initially) and become independent. Some of the researchers chose to move on, but the rest pooled their resources and managed to scrape up enough to buy their independence.

Today, the colonists are a self-sufficient, rugged, pioneering group of families who continue to learn about and tame their world [gov 0], working with early 21st century equivalent technology [TL 8]. The population has grown to 700 people [pop 2, multiplier 7], and the inhabitants spend much of their time farming the algal mats on the ocean to process into food and generally performing more research and exploration of the surrounding environment. While it isn't the best of environments, it's still their home.

Archaea is somewhat off the beaten track and its starport facilities are poor, consisting of a beacon next to a reasonably flat lava field near the base [type E starport]. However, the locals are eager to hear news from other systems and will trade valuable processed biochemical compounds that their facilities still produce for information and other goods.

Now tell me you can't get anything useful out of a UWP. :twisted:

And more to the point, tell me that you could get anything remotely that detailed out of the scant SF profile you posted.

Remember, the UWP is not the system used to create it, it is an expression of that system. It could easily be expressed differently.

You need to demonstrate a NEED to express it differently. Like I said (repeatedly), it could do with a few additions, but the general idea has worked well for 30 years.

Dredd (and Dredd is by no means limited to Earth) and Strontium Dog have a very different idiom. The UWP doesn't taste like Wagner and Ezquerra.

It doesn't have to. The UWP is generic, it's the descriptions of that UWP that tie it to a particular setting.

 

[pasuuli]

Quite right - the UWPs are Space-Operatic, and nothing more. And SST's not alone in wanting more than just some bare data; Traveller games require the GM to write up what the worlds are actually like. As EDG and others mention, the UWP is the starting point.

I do think there's a lot to be said for providing some guidelines for interpreting the UWPs though. If there's a step between "here's the UWP" and "here's a full description" that explains how to get from one to the other then that could be very helpful. Like, what does it mean if a star is a given type, or how low gravity or thin atmosphere affects what the environment of small worlds would be like, or what life would be like if there were 50 billion people on a planet, etc.

I so agree. Sounds like important information that I would like to have available as a referee.

 

[pasuuli]

It's not a case of not being bothered to write up stuff. I like writing up stuff. The UWP prevents me writing what I want. I'm restricted to a few half-hearted facts. If I pay good money for a product, I expect more than UWP.

Yes! And in fact most of the Traveller world has added on additional chunks of numeric cruft to the UWP, as if knowing this implicitly. Some of the cruft caught on, and some hasn't.

The UWP is nice and terse, if you're a computer, or if you're a referee who doesn't mind looking at strings of characters. I'm one of them.

But, the UWP is a real pain if you're used to doing things the way natural humans expect things done: using a native human language. I mean, why make things hard on newbies. As if we want to scare people away.

So while I don't want UWPs to go away, I think we need a text block as well. And in Mongoose's core rulebook, they might -only- need a text block. I wouldn't feel slighted.

 

[EDG]

I think there's several issues here really:

1) Do UWPs need expanding?
2) Should there be a text block?
3) Does a UWP give you enough useful information to fill a text block?
4) Should UWPs be removed and we should just use a text block instead?

To both (1) and (2) I'd answer "yes, definitely", I think I just soundly demonstrated that (3) is also confirmed, and to (4) I say "Hell, no".

Expanded UWPs with accompanying text blocks is likely to make everyone happy. Having just one or the other will piss off a lot of people either way. Seems to me that combining them is the best way to go.

 

[Klaus Kipling]

I think it was you that mentioned laziness earlier, when you labelled the use of UWPs as lazy. I think it's the other way round though - complaining that people shouldn't have to learn a few numbers is what strikes me as being "lazy". I learned what all those tables meant in a few days when I was in my teens, are you really telling me that people are intimidated by them now? If they are, then I'd say that they're really not the target audience for the game.

It's not laziness. I've pored over Spinward Marches supplement, to make sense of it, to work out which worlds were important. I wanted to be able to look at an ss and see which worlds were the significant ones, and that takes analysis and comparisons. The high pop world might not be the most significant, the highest tech level may not be either, neither might the one with all the bases, or the xboat links The raw UWps were a bit tasteless in the end; it was in the adventures where the flavour came. I can come up with a dozen different worlds based on a single UWP. That's just too vague for a supplement.

How big is the planet? What atmosphere does it have? Does it have any water? How many people live on it? How long is its year? What life does it have on it? What are its natural resources? What else is in the system? What's the technology level? What government does it have? How do they rule?

Well I never suggested we ditch the UWP and go for SF notation. I said it wasn't as a sophisticated, but it still manages to convey an almost similar amount of info.

What it does tell me: Star name, planet name, Race, Population, Trade type, Gravity, Moons, Day Length.

What it doesn't: size, atmo, hydro, gov type, law level, tech, port.

At first glance not so good then. However....
I can infer size form gravity, in Earth masses, a useful comparison. I've not memorised Earth's diameter, even if you think we should, and I certainly know my players haven't. A comparison with Earth makes life easier. Much of the rest is implicit in the setting (that only breathable atmo worlds were settled, a uniform tech level, standard government and law), with exceptions mentioned in the short capsule.

I actually find knowing how long the day is is often more important when running adventures than the exact diameter in kilometres.

Now tell me you can't get anything useful out of a UWP. :twisted:

well of course you can. Like is said, any ref worth his salt could, and I'm not denying that. But what about the player? Doesn't give them much to go on, without having the time to worry over it all. And will they see what I see in it?

And it was the write up that gave it flavour and atmosphere, not the UWP. That was just the source code. You had to explain every number in prose. If I was to buy a product a page at a time I'd take your write up over a ss block of UWPs.

I must confess I have being playing devil's advocate a little here. :twisted:

But to answer your points.

1) oh yes!
2) oh yes!
3) of course, given good imaginative authorship
4) wouldn't bother me, but as people care, and it obviously hardly takes up any space, then of course include it.

btw, despite hating GURPS as a system, I like all the GT stuff - I find those world data blocks very helpful, and just find it a pity it's tricky to convert to a CT UWP for comparison, not having the main rulebook.

 

[EDG]

It's not laziness. I've pored over Spinward Marches supplement, to make sense of it, to work out which worlds were important. I wanted to be able to look at an ss and see which worlds were the significant ones, and that takes analysis and comparisons. The high pop world might not be the most significant, the highest tech level may not be either, neither might the one with all the bases, or the xboat links The raw UWps were a bit tasteless in the end; it was in the adventures where the flavour came. I can come up with a dozen different worlds based on a single UWP. That's just too vague for a supplement.

Well, the CT Spinward Marches supplement isn't exactly what I was holding up as the pinnacle of sector book design .

I will admit that some UWPs are harder to generate interesting text descriptions for (ironically the ones I have most trouble with are the most earthlike worlds!). And you are right in that in some cases you can come up with a bunch of different possibilities for a world - but that said if you're using a given UWP those possibilities tend to be pretty similar to eachother.

In a putative supplement though I think there's certainly room for having the UWP as a starter point and a text description to fill it all out.

Well I never suggested we ditch the UWP and go for SF notation. I said it wasn't as a sophisticated, but it still manages to convey an almost similar amount of info.

...

At first glance not so good then. However....

I was about to say... no, it doesn't give you even close to a similar amount of information

I can infer size form gravity, in Earth masses, a useful comparison

If you assume the density is the same.

Much of the rest is implicit in the setting (that only breathable atmo worlds were settled, a uniform tech level, standard government and law), with exceptions mentioned in the short capsule.

That sounds like a really dull universe though, if nothing but the habitable worlds are settled (I agree that they should be the most populous, but there's always going to be small outposts and research bases on other less habitable worlds).

I actually find knowing how long the day is is often more important when running adventures than the exact diameter in kilometres.

Well in the spirit of being constructive, how about we come up with a list of other useful stuff that would be good to see in a UWP?

(and hey, the horizon distance can be useful! )

well of course you can. Like is said, any ref worth his salt could, and I'm not denying that. But what about the player? Doesn't give them much to go on, without having the time to worry over it all. And will they see what I see in it?

Yeah, but it's not the player's job to come up with the world descriptions, it's the GM's! (well, unless you play one of those crazy indie games where the GMs don't actually run the game or whatever. But Traveller isn't one of those).

And it was the write up that gave it flavour and atmosphere, not the UWP. That was just the source code. You had to explain every number in prose. If I was to buy a product a page at a time I'd take your write up over a ss block of UWPs.

True, but the point remains that I couldn't have got that detailed a writeup without that "source code". Or at least, I could have just come up with a bunch of random stuff that may or may not have been internally consistent and sensible. Like I said, the UWP is necessary to provide the framework to build the detailed description - so it'd be a bad idea to lose that.

3) of course, given good imaginative authorship

Ah, but it's more than that. It's not just imagination that's required - the imaginative part of it is built over the hard data in the UWP itself. Like you said, it's the "source code" - the description is built up naturally from that.


I'm glad we generally agree on the core issues though .

 

[Klaus Kipling]

Well alot of the issues that put me off the UWP are possibly more to do with the system behind it, with all the weird and ridiculous results that it can generate.

I did once muse over an extened UWP format trying to get to sleep one night.

It separated planetology details from civilisation details.

starport

size-atmo-hydro-climate-biosphere-resources

pop-gov-law-wealth-military-tech (Norway, for instance, would be something like 649828 on the civ scale, the US 844AA8)

but I'd like to know of moons and day length too now.... :wink:

 

[pasuuli]

but I'd like to know of moons and day length too now.... :wink:

Uh oh, another "World Builder"...

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

I must admit, that I would rather know the length of day then the number of Asteroid Belts in the system...

Belters there may be, but day was needed more often in the games I ran and played in.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

Well alot of the issues that put me off the UWP are possibly more to do with the system behind it, with all the weird and ridiculous results that it can generate.

I did once muse over an extened UWP format trying to get to sleep one night.

It separated planetology details from civilisation details.

starport

size-atmo-hydro-climate-biosphere-resources

pop-gov-law-wealth-military-tech (Norway, for instance, would be something like 649828 on the civ scale, the US 844AA8)

but I'd like to know of moons and day length too now.... :wink:

I actually like this.

BUT, given that Mongoose will probably HAVE to stay with something close to the UWP, it might be better to define Wealth-Military and Climate-Bio-Resources as extensions similar to the existing PBG which could even be added to yours:

Population Modifier-Wealth-Military (PWM)
Climate-Biosphere-Resources (CBR)
Worlds-Belts-Gas Giants (WBG)

Three extensions that give you a LOT of info.

 

[EDG]

I must admit, that I would rather know the length of day then the number of Asteroid Belts in the system.

Yeah, the number of belts always struck me as irrelevant too

 

[Klaus Kipling]

That sounds a reasonable method. I mean the T20 weapon charts contain alot of data, so a few 'addendums' aren't necessarily going to ruin the neat format, implemented properly.

It's the GOV code that might be tricky. It might be worth breaking it up into 3 codes.

Leadership type (like, hereditary monarchy, Multi-party rule, One party state, corporate, religious, tribalism, etc)

Economic system (state property, unfettered capitalism, mixed economy, mercantilism, welfare state, feudal etc)

Military (in conjunction with law level and leadership, might show if the world tends to be xenophobic or open)

Getting my inspiration from the Civics from Civ 4 here.


Another factor that might be useful is the age of the civilisation, whether it's native, Pax Vilani, Rule of Man, Long Night, Early 3I, recent colony.

Would people find that useful?

 

[Flynn]

As a long-time Traveller fan, I have to admit that I want the UWP to stay in RTT. An expanded paragraph afterwords is okay to add, but I would ask, "Please don't take away my UWPs!"

With Regards,
Flynn

 

[qstor]

As a long-time Traveller fan, I have to admit that I want the UWP to stay in RTT. An expanded paragraph afterwords is okay to add, but I would ask, "Please don't take away my UWPs!"

With Regards,
Flynn

GT, TNE and the MT World Builder Handbook have expanded system generation that's compatible with the CT UWP I'd like to see something like that for Mongoose Traveller.

Mike

 

[pasuuli]

As a long-time Traveller fan, I have to admit that I want the UWP to stay in RTT. An expanded paragraph afterwords is okay to add, but I would ask, "Please don't take away my UWPs!"

With Regards,
Flynn

GT, TNE and the MT World Builder Handbook have expanded system generation that's compatible with the CT UWP I'd like to see something like that for Mongoose Traveller.

Mike

Something like that would probably be ok with me.